


The Evolution of Chris Beck

by annakin14



Category: The Martian (2015)
Genre: Eventual Relationships, F/M, Freeform, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-03
Updated: 2016-06-03
Packaged: 2018-07-11 22:13:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7072567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/annakin14/pseuds/annakin14
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At heart, Chris Beck was a caretaker, he could have hardly ended up being anything else. An exploration of the character and how he sees himself and the world, before and after mars. Just a long ramble.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Evolution of Chris Beck

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know if this came out very coherently but I tried my best. I was very possessed to write this and definitely did it with the image of Sebastian Stan and Kate Mara in my brain. Sorry if it's not super accurate to the book or anything. Just stuff I thought was interesting about his character and how he ended up who he was. Hopefully some people enjoy in depth character analysis like I do :-P  
> I originally posted this on tumblr with added imagery http://annakin14.tumblr.com/post/145321208842/characters-dr-chris-beck-at-heart-chris

At heart, Chris Beck was a caretaker, he could have hardly ended up being anything else. The Beck family was a weirdly dynastic one of refined Connecticut stock, breeding generations upon generations of Senators, military and company men. But by the time Chris’s sister Becca was born, his father was the last Beck and never seemed to come out from under his all-important-air to spend any time with his children….unless, of course, you counted the weekly screaming matches with his much younger wife over the future of their progeny, which usually ended with each retreating back to opposites sides of their palatial home and leaving the children in silence once again. So naturally, it fell to him to take care of Becca and he didn’t think twice about it. If there was anything that had been impressed upon him by that young age, it was that the Beck name was synonymous with duty. And he loved his sister. So case closed.

He spent much of his younger years trying to please everyone, in order to avoid conflict. He got good grades to please his father, trying his best to emulate the potent masculinity of the Beck name. He always knew when his mother was about to burst into hysterics about some horrid thing his father had done, and was quick to give her his shoulder and maybe even a stiff drink. And he tried to be the most perfect brother, sparing Becca the pain of dealing with their parents as much as possible. But as Chris got older, his care-taking became less and less about duty and instead hovered nearer to self-preservation and survival. He had to be able to read the emotions of the room. He had to be able to read people. He had to know, so he could get Becca out.

This behavior continued all throughout high school until everything came to a head the night of Chris’s graduation party. His parents announced their impending divorce that night to anyone who was concerned, this was the first their children had heard of it, and their intention to sell their Connecticut residence and separate as soon as possible. It wasn’t how Chris had expected it to happen. And he certainly didn’t expect his 16 year-old sister to run away that very same night either. Becca didn’t like being left behind, her parents didn’t care about her, the only one who did was Chris and he was going off to Yale without her. So she did her own leaving, living and crashing with her friends family in California…as far from Connecticut as she could get. It practically killed Chris, knowing that he could no longer protect her. He never forgave his parents. But he still tried to please them.

An interesting thing happened to Chris, he realized then that he didn’t know himself at all. Not one bit. He still wanted to please his father in an absent yet ever-present way, but he had no immediate person to please or take care of anymore except himself. And he had no idea what he wanted. All of his attention had been extended outwards to other peoples feelings, and he never bothered to get to know his own. He felt dead. He felt useless. He started going through the motions. He still came from ridiculously good genes, and his IQ allowed him to skate his way through with good grades for the first few years. He joined the Air Force Reserves to get his father off his back, started taking pre-med classes in some subconscious attempt to fill the void he felt in himself with patients and new people to care about. It didn’t work. It wasn’t until he was a junior at Yale that he found the other side of his personality.

Chris was an adrenaline-junkie. He didn’t understand himself or his own feelings and so he fell for the only thing that could make him feel alive anymore. It started with women. He enjoyed the adrenaline of the chase. He knew he was good looking, score one for the Beck genes once again, and he was pretty damn smart and came from a family with money. All of that helped. Chris loved pleasing women and having them please him in return. But he soon got tired of it, too many of the Yale women reminded him of his mother, looking to him for something that he tried to give them but never really felt beyond the fleeting thrill of sex. Chris moved onto cars, racking up such an insane number of speeding tickets in one semester that it warranted a call from his father telling him to knock it off. 

Naturally, planes were next. He was in the Air Force Reserves, after all. It was a thrill that nothing else could match. The first time he went up, he felt something rise up in his chest and claw it’s way through his veins. It was the free fall that got him, the knowledge that there was only metal and wires between him and complete nothingness and oblivion. He felt small and inconsequential, and yet so enormous and infinite….and most importantly, in control. Like most kids who had grown up with a domineering father, he had had little control of his life as a kid and resented it. Yet when he was finally out in the world on his own, he craved the straight forwardness of it, the clarity. When he had someone else telling him what to do and where to go, he didn’t need to worry about how he didn’t know himself or what he wanted, he didn’t have to feel the void anymore. Ironically, the Air Force Reserves were the best thing that had happened to him. He liked the structure. He liked knowing that he was doing something important, that set him apart, that gave him that big feeling. 

The day he found out about the SpaceX program, he was still pretty young. He had been cutting risky flight maneuvers for awhile, somehow they always paid off for him, and his captain pulled him aside, seeing in Chris some spark of relentless desire to move forward, to climb the next hurdle. And that was it. That was the moment for Chris. It was clear and straightforward, he wanted space. He wanted it like he had never wanted anything in his life, except maybe his sister back. And then everything just fell into place for him. He would do anything to qualify and he knew that he needed something that would set him apart. His mother did the singular parenting of her life, suggesting to him that he stick out his medical degree and become a flight surgeon. So it was Yale Medical School. Graduating cum laude, climbing the ranks to make Air Force Captain, a Master degree in biomedical sciences. Anything he could get that would increase his chances, he took it. And the rest of his life, he completely ignored. No time for a girlfriend. He barely talked to his parents. Becca finally started calling him around the same time she was applying for colleges but their relationship was never as close as when they had been kids, their connection fraying over the distance. He joined NASA. He went to the SpaceX station twice, training extensively to be an EVA specialist. And there was still more up ahead for him to conquer, it never stopped giving.

And so the man that first met Beth Johanssen was extremely single-minded and focused, sometimes rigid, but airing more on the side of agreeableness than neuroticism. He was a smart man, maybe not a genius, but a man with a relentless brain. He was a man with a swagger, the kind that came from pushing limits (usually his own) and being rewarded for it. He was a man who was impeccably groomed and very neat, all of his Air Force training sticking with him throughout the years. He was introverted but knew how to talk to people, extremely empathetic, conscientious, wanted to please, had a finely honed sense of duty and he thought he knew what he wanted, which was to be a commander. Beth completely shattered all of that with just one look at Chris.

She wasn’t like anyone Chris had ever met before. Beth wasn’t like any of the women he had “dated”, neither was she like his mother. She didn’t look to him with any kind of expectation, she stood on her own. She was smarter than him. She was a genius. She was small, activating that protective feeing in him, with a sort of sharp-elfin look about her, and a mouth that was more prone to quick grins and smirks than full out smiles and laughs. And he could not read her for the life of him. He had absolutely no idea where he stood with her, he couldn’t measure his words or behavior, she always caught him off guard. It was maddening. Chris was used to reading people, sitting back with control and observing how he would approach someone before he did. He knew he has a reputation as being aloof and hard to get to know, slow to warm up. But he was warm to Beth immediately, and she gave him nothing. He had never wanted to please someone more. 

It was a problem. Especially for Nasa. Especially if he wanted to be a commander. After the Ares 3 crew had been officially chosen, Chris knew that regulations meant he needed to steer clear of Beth Johanssen. But that was a lot harder than it sounded. She was nice to him. She was friendly, quiet and introverted, but she got along with the rest of the crew well, chiming in during Martinez’s daily ribbing and joking. And she was a breath of fresh air. She came from outside Nasa, she wasn’t military or interested in the science aspect, she came for the ship, for the coding and the software. It was hard to stay away from her. It didn’t help that Chris was massively attracted to her dark eyes, the way she would curl her body up on whatever chair she was sitting in. He thought her hoodie was ridiculously cute…Just being around her made Chris feel things he had never felt before. He found himself daydreaming about her smooth skin, her lean body hovering over his, her mouth ticking up in a smirk before taking his cock in her mouth. He imagined what it would be like to just hold her small body against his, stroking her silky bobbed hair, pulling a blanket around her shoulders and taking care of her. Chris even found himself on the cusp of asking her for drinks after various training sessions a few times before he realized what he was doing and abruptly cut himself off and stalked off in the opposite direction. He was sure that Beth thought he was an idiot, looking at her with moony eyes and goofy smiles, tongue-tied and jittery like a fucking virgin. He didn’t even recognize himself anymore.

What Chris didn’t realize was that it was good that he was finally feeling something again. That he needed to become comfortable with not being in control anymore because the things that were about to happen were so completely out of his control that it was laughable. They hadn’t even launched yet and the Ares 3 mission was already changing Chris, and it was for the better. All of a sudden, he had a family again. Lewis, Watney, Martinez, Vogel, Johanssen, they were his family. He took care of them, but this time, they took care of him right back. There was duty, yes, but they were a team. He could count on them in a way he could never count on anyone but himself in the past. He fell into friendship with them. He relaxed his single-minded focus. These people understood. They were all chasing something bigger than them, and yet it all came down to them. These people were just as important as the mission was. He joked around with Martinez and Watney, blushing and laughing goofily at his own dumb jokes, surprised at himself. He unconsciously started emulating Commander Lewis, even going as far as listening to some of her disco music to try and get into her mind. It was a short-lived experiment. Vogel started teaching him some German, his years of French not helping him here. And Johanssen…she possessed him completely. Her smell, the way she moved. The tapping of her fingers on her laptop keyboard, the way she inhaled coffee every morning. He found that he had started inadvertantly giving her little touches. Her shoulder, her elbow. He started leaning into her space more, whispering in her ear to tell her something he could have said plainly.

It got so bad that Commander Lewis pulled him and his other cremates aside and pointedly said if any of them hit on Beth she would personally castrate them. Commander Lewis was looking straight at him. He knew he was fucked. Somehow, Somehow he pulled it together. Chris had never felt anything like this before, how was he supposed to know he was in love with her? His sister Becca certainly figured it out before he did. She came out to visit him for a weekend, the crew throwing a farewell party with their families before the final stage of the launch ramp-up began. Becca didn’t understand her brother most of the time, he never let her in. She knew that was mostly her fault for abandoning him when she was 16 and not trusting him to take care of her. But when she saw Chris light up around Beth, a long hidden bounce to his step revealing itself, a vestige of the boyishness of his past self, she knew. Her brother was in love. And she told him. And Chris new all of a sudden that it was true, though the importance of that fact escaped him at the moment. After all, he was going into space for a year-long mission to another planet. Somehow, Chris pushed his feelings aside for one last time in favor of looking forward at the mission ahead.

It didn’t sink in that Watney was dead for quite awhile. intellectually, Chris knew it. He had been vocal in helping make that call. His call in that moment had been completely rational, the doctor and the crew-mate in him rearing up to take charge as the friend in him felt like he would throw up. He felt a sense of duty, he felt he needed to step up in that moment and help Commander Lewis with the decision to launch the MAV and abort their mission early. The emotions didn’t hit him until later, after the shock and adrenaline had worn off. And it wrecked him. Practically, he knew he made the right choice. But in his heart he wasn’t sure that he wanted to be the kind of person who would make that choice anymore. He thought of the kid he used to be, the one who loved his sister blindly and with complete devotion, who cared about people and wanted to help them…the heart of him…and he thought that little kid would be ashamed of him now. That he had abandoned his friend, dead or not, just like he had been abandoned as a kid by his parents and his sister. He didn’t want to be cold and unfeeling like his father. He didn’t want to be a coward like his mother either. But still, on some level, Chris still thought that these kinds of decisions would eventually be his in the future, so he needed to find a way of dealing with them or he would fall apart. It wasn’t until Beth came to him that his world flipped upside down.

He was trying to keep his mind busy doing busy work during his scheduled free time, instead of lounging in his bunk, when he heard her call out to him suddenly from the doorway. Up until that moment, Beth had somehow seemed unreachable to him. She was introverted and independent. She didn’t usually reach out to other people. She wasn’t cold, quite the opposite, she had a fire burning steadily in her heart at all times and exuded a confident warmth…but she dealt with her problems herself. It was one of the things that frustrated Chris the most, his own instinct was to comfort and take care and protect those that he loved and to love someone who didn’t need that from him was freeing but also meant that there was nowhere to go with her because there was no exchange of feelings. But this time, Beth stood in front of him and the fire in her heart was flickering. She had bruises underneath her eyes from lack of sleep, and the usual impish quirk in her lips was replaced with an almost imperceptible trembling. She was barely holding it together. Beth called his name and Chris went to her, folding her into his embrace, both of them letting out deep sighs of relief. That moment was painful, but it felt right. Like two puzzle pieces finally fitting together. And they didn’t separate. Chris threw duty out the window for the first time in his life because Beth was more important. He was in love with her and that was the most important thing. They were alive and they would be together.

Chris almost couldn’t believe that he was allowed to be so happy when Watney’s dead body was being buried in the Mars sands behind them. But he was deliriously happy because of Beth. She slept with him in his bunk every night, her small body fitting perfectly against his. She looked for him during the day, reaching out to brush her hand against his in passing. She told him about how when she was a kid she never felt like she fit in, the only thing she had was her computer. Coding seemed like the only thing that made sense when everyone in school was years older than her, a lot less smart than she was, and only seemed to care about things like parties and boys and money. She wanted something big. She wanted her work to matter. She wanted to push herself and see the edge of human capability. Chris fell for her even harder. Beth told him she knew she had wanted to sleep with him from the very beginning, to smash down his walls and make him moan and break apart his perfect exterior but she hadn’t know she was in love with him until one of the first days on Mars, when she heard him tell one of the filthiest jokes she had ever heard to Watney, not realizing their comms were open. He had looked at her with wide-eyes, a blush racing down his neck and burst into a goofy laugh, embarrassed and yet proud of himself. I knew then, she told him, I always fall in love with the dorks. Chris couldn’t believe it.

What was more unbelievable was that Watney was somehow still alive on that deserted planet. Chris could barely breathe with the guilt of it. Commander Lewis was crumbling as well. He could see Beth looking over at him with concern, but all he could do was concentrate on not letting the tears fall. He was doing a shit job of it. Ever since he had started flying he had accepted the immense nothingness of space as something welcoming. Foreign, maybe, trying to kill us, sure, but still somehow exhilarating and calming at that same time. Now the thought of all that space and immensity sitting between the Hermes and Watney made Chris want to scream and tear everything down. It was wrong. It was just plain wrong. They had left him to die. To slowly die in the immensity of space all alone. Somehow, until that moment, space had never seemed to Chris to be lonely or isolating. And even if they were, he didn’t mind. Maybe he even gravitated toward it. But now…things were different. He had a crew. He had friends, a family. He had Beth. And he knew that the thought of dying alone and abandoned was the worst thing he could ever think of. And he had sentenced his friend to that fate. 

Finally, Chris had his revelation. He knew himself and what he wanted more clearly than he ever had in his entire life. Everything else had been a clumsy attempt at living (some might say his version of clumsy was others versions of incredible success but, I digress). He had charged forward blindly and constructed a path for himself that had given him so many things but didn’t bring him any closer to what he really wanted in his heart. It had taken him away from people, outwards and toward the unknown, but it was only dumb luck that the woman he loved was reaching for that unknown too. If none of this had happened, they would have continued as they were, he would have pushed his feelings and wants aside in favor of the illusion of control he had over his life. But it wasn’t what he truly wanted. He wanted Beth. He wanted a family with her. On Earth. He wanted to care for the people he loved and he wanted to protect the and keep them safe the way he never felt when he was a kid. He just had to go to the far reaches of space to figure it the fuck out. He didn’t want to command, like his father, he wanted a partner, a teammate. He didn’t want merely duty.

And when Chris sacrificed his life and everything he had worked for in order to get back Watney, he did it gladly. But not because of duty. Because Watney was his friend and his crew-mate and he knew that was more important than anything to him.


End file.
